Single-Channel Speech Enhancement With Phase Reconstruction Based on Phase Distortion Averaging

Speech enhancement has been widely investigated for several decades, but by modifying only the amplitude spectrum of a speech signal, ignoring the phase spectrum, which has been regarded as an unimportant feature. However, it was recently reported that the phase spectrum plays an important role in speech quality and intelligibility. In this paper, we propose a phase reconstruction method based on harmonic enhancement using the fundamental frequency and phase distortion feature. This feature is known to show fluctuations in the phase spectrum with respect to time and frequency. We estimate the speech phase spectrum by considering the relationship between harmonic phase spectra. Experimental evaluations indicate that the proposed phase reconstruction method improves speech quality in various noisy environments.